Zodiak sticks to unofficial results, Kazako says no apologies

One of the local radios that were appointed by the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) as official broadcasters of the 2014 tripartite election Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS) says it owes no one an apology for announcing election result that many people believe were fake.

Speaking soon after the MEC chairperson Maxon Mbendera announced the commencement of the vote recount exercise on Monday, ZBS managing director Gospel Kazako said there was no way the radio would know that the results were fake because it was just announcing what was officially released from the polling stations after all the concerned parties there appended their signatures on the result sheet.

Kadzako: No apologies

“The responsibility given to us was just to announce the results not cross checking or comparing figures,” he said.

Kazako also said to some extended their announcement may have helped some people to see that something somewhere went wrong.

“And when we were announcing the results we have always been carrying out a disclaimer that ‘these are unofficial results’ meaning that the official results were to be announced by the MEC officials. The problem is that people misunderstood us. Surprisingly when we were announcing the results no candidate came to us to dispute the figures,” he said.

Kazako said the radio was just like a commentator in a football match and MEC was the referee.

The unofficial results from ZBS are putting opposition leader Peter Mutharika a winner of the elections. Preliminary results from the MEC after counting 30 percent of the votes received also put Mutharika on the lead.

This was supported by the results from the Parallel Vote Tabulation exercise conducted by the Malawi Electoral Support Network.

However other candidates have disputed this accusing Mutharika of rigging the elections.

The Malawi electoral commission told reporters on Monday that it has received 275 complaints against the conduct of electoral process and that it has so far addressed 170 of them.

It also said that it has discovered that 58 polling centers have more voters than the number of people who had registered.

The Commission said it is now going for a vote recount which it said would take not more than 30 days.